Guide

Workflow

The day-to-day loop: get it down while it's fresh, come back and sharpen it later, and let the old ideas find their way back to you on their own.

There's nothing to set up here. No structure to design, no tagging system to invent, no weekly review you're supposed to keep up with and eventually stop doing. The whole commitment, really, is writing one sentence when you learn something. This page walks through what that actually looks like once you're doing it. If you want the reasoning behind it instead, see Why ThinkerNotes.

The loop

1

Get it down while it's fresh

Write a draft. One line, however it comes out, right after a sales call reframes something for you, or a podcast says the thing you'd been trying to put into words. There's no title to think of and no folder to choose. It just goes in your inbox, and it sits there until you come back to it.

2

Come back and sharpen it into an insight

When you're ready, turn the draft into an insight: add whatever context it needs, and cut it down to the point you actually want to make. This is usually the part that takes it from "something I jotted down" to something that's genuinely yours, and honestly it only takes a minute. Once you save it as an insight, the draft goes away. The insight is the note that sticks around from here on.

3

See what it connects to

As soon as you save an insight, ThinkerNotes shows you the older notes that relate to it. That matching happens by meaning, not just by shared words, so a note about showing up consistently every week can surface next to an older note about distribution, even though neither one uses the other's exact language. If a suggestion genuinely belongs, you link it, and from then on it's connected on both notes.

Tags

You can add a tag or two if it helps you scan through a list later, but nothing here depends on it. Search doesn't need tags to work, and neither does the linking. Think of tags as a bit of convenience for browsing, not as the thing actually holding your notes together. That job belongs to the links between notes.

Search checks keywords and tags first, the way you'd expect. But if you can only half remember how you phrased something, you can just describe the shape of the idea instead. ThinkerNotes also searches by meaning underneath the surface, so the note you're thinking of can come back even if none of the words you typed actually appear in it.

Topics

You don't have to organize your insights into anything. ThinkerNotes periodically groups them into topics on its own, based on what they're actually about, and names each group automatically. Those topics show up as a row of filter chips at the top of your Insights list, so you can narrow the list down to just the notes about pricing, or just the ones from a particular project, without having filed a single one of them yourself.

Notes from what you read

For books, podcasts, newsletters and articles, you can add the source itself as a piece of media, and then attach literature notes to it as you go. Each one of those notes stays linked back to where it came from, so months later you can still tell which book a particular note originally came out of. You can also import your Kindle highlights this way and turn them into notes that sit right next to the book they're from.

If you decide to leave

Everything you've written is exportable, any time. Your notes are yours whether or not you keep using ThinkerNotes.

Want an AI assistant to search through these notes for you instead? Take a look at the MCP server page. It reads exactly what's described here, and nothing more than that.